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The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

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Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

#101

Post by placebo »

WalterBright wrote: post #79
shermantanktop wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT has taken to saying things like “What I would do now is…” or “if I were you I’d…”. I know these are figures of speech, but it reminds me that this thing doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t learn anything, it can’t try anything and find out. And yet it uses speech patterns drawn from real humans who can and do all those things.

Listen! And understand. That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!

The terminator you talk about is a movie character. It might be built one day, it might not. It is also totally irrelevant considering there is a real terminator which can be described with the same adjectives and built in to every personal life that ever existed or will exist. Knowing how to deal with that seems more important than worrying about some specific scenario.

Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

#102

Post by tgv »

falcor84 wrote: post #46

It's a well-written monologue, with a fabulous delivery, but I think it fails spectacularly for this argument. From what I just looked into, neither of the main people involved, including Damon, Affleck, Williams, Van Sant, Reiner or Goldman, had personally experienced those scenarios of fighting on the front lines and having a friend die in their arms, or of losing their spouse to cancer. But nevertheless, they had…

Isn't it called empathy?

Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

#103

Post by scotty79 »

shermantanktop wrote: post #14
jimbokun wrote: post #8

I agree. This Robin Williams monologue nails exactly why LLMs make us so uneasy. They speak fluently and confidently about experiences it’s impossible for them to have. They can’t taste a strawberry or do any of the things Robin Williams names. There are a number of people building these machines who literally believe the machines will replace us and because they will be more powerful than us so nothing meaningful wi…

ChatGPT has taken to saying things like “What I would do now is…” or “if I were you I’d…”. I know these are figures of speech, but it reminds me that this thing doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t learn anything, it can’t try anything and find out. And yet it uses speech patterns drawn from real humans who can and do all those things.

> it can’t try anything and find out

Talk to an agent. It definitely learns things. Maybe not the taste of strawberry but about what is really going on in the software you are building with it.

Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

#104

Post by Garlef »

I like it;

But I think there's a middle ground: You can definitely use GenAI to bring yourself to the page.

But that requires effort that goes beyond "draw me a pelican riding a bicycle".

I've used to create abstract art/(or "images that look like abstract art" if you prefer - let's not get distracted by this branch of the discourse) using midjourney: getting the AI to output something worthwhile would usually take me hours of iterating over a prompt - entering a feedback loop until two things happen: first, congruence between your intent and the output (both change during iteration! ); second, the output stabilizes with growing prompt length. and so generating the output turns from a slot-machine into something deliberate and personal

(lots of caveats of course but i think it's a worthwhile perspective)

PS -- What I forgot to mention: Its usually a hard fight to get out of the slop zone; The midjourney models have very boring default aesthetics and styles of composition (insultingly boring!)

Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

#105

Post by scotty79 »

tadfisher wrote: post #28
SoftTalker wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a movie. The whole thing is fiction. Robin Williams memorized the whole monologue, or was reading que cards.

Ask ChatGPT sometime about the artistic medium of cinema, and how words combined with actors speaking them can be meant to provoke something within the viewer.

> can be meant to provoke something within the viewer.

Doesn't make it any less fake. Both the message and the delivery.

Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

#106

Post by scotty79 »

esperent wrote: post #85
nok22kon wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

same as literature which can provoke something in the viewer. sometimes so strong it wins a literary prize. then it turns out it was written by a LLM.

Are you talking about this? https://www.reddit.com/r/literature/comments/1thqxgt/a_prize... Linking the reddit thread rather than the article because it quite rightly rips the prize winning story apart as obvious LLM writing, to anyone familiar with LLMs. Another way of looking at that is that it was able to fake a simulacrum of artistic endeavor, enough to fool some people into giving it a prize. But anyone who spen…

I think average people can easily spot AI because it mimics literature and most people don't spend that much time with literature. However literary critics should be fooled way more easily because what we perceive as stiff fakery is their daily bread and butter. People do write like AI, just not the people we are exposed to mostly.

I remember riding a train and there were other two passengers talking. And they talked in so obnoxiously literary manner I was cringing all the time. Those people were just reading a lot of high literature and their speech patterns aligned. For an average ear it doesn't sound good. And AIs, the smart ones, don't sound good in a very similar fashion.

Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

#107

Post by drdaeman »

65 wrote: post #19

If we are moved emotionally by slop, does it matter? If AI can produce something to make you think and feel, does it matter? It made you think and feel.

Isn’t “slop” defined as something that is perceived as inaccurate and flawed?

If you don’t get a “uh, that’s slop/bullshit/word salad/…” reaction then it’s not a slop anymore.

Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

#109

Post by arjie »

I don't think very much of this nonsense, if I'm being honest. It's the kind of righteously indignant palaver that is very popular in the /r/MurderedByWords /r/CleverComebacks stuff that has no meaning to me because some of my favourite works were by Steinbeck writing about things he didn't personally experience and so on. I haven't yet read anything striking by LLMs that I know of, but I hope to one day because it would be incredible to read something that aggregates human experience and allows other humans to flow into it at will. What an incredible machine that would be, even if it somehow had no experiences of its own. A marvelous dream.

Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

#110

Post by moffkalast »

mirsadm wrote: post #98
dualvariable wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had claude throw something like "the last time I did ..." at me. They seem to be trying to pump up the "humanity" to keep people engaged with it, which really backfires with me.

You're right to push back...

Fair points all around — let me actually check rather than guess.
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